Hi Everyone,
So today I'm going to be talking about Communities; Why you should be building one pre-launch, how to put together your brand, communication and content strategy in order to help build one, setting up your community hub and most importantly how to turn your community into an extension of your team.
I'll also explain why and how this can benefit your creative, marketing and business processes, help you raise additional funding and help you mitigate risk at launch.
I don't profess to be an expert in the field of community management or marketing and some of you may already be going through the processes of building your communities and working through your marketing plans, but no matter your level of experience hopefully you'll get some use out of this.
Who Am I?
Before I get started I should probably tell you a bit about myself - I'm Justin French, founder and CEO of Dream Harvest.
Previous to starting Dream Harvest I worked in both AAA and Indie as a sound designer, composer, project manager and consultant. I also used to teach game design and development at a local college as an industry specialist where I re-wrote the ICT Level 2 BTEC course, replacing the focus on app development using Visual Basic with games development using Unity and C#, giving 16 - 19-year-olds a real taste of industry-relevant skills. I also used to work as a game and tech recruiter for a recruitment agency. Previous to the games industry I worked in the music industry as a freelance recording and mix engineer at studios across the country as well as a business adviser to musicians.
As a studio, we're developing NeuroSlicers, a cyberpunk real-time strategy game that combines solo, co-op and competitive PVP gameplay into a seamless narrative-driven experience.
Our community is central to our business strategy, we started building ours before we even had a playable and is especially important due to our attempts to really innovate the genre's core mechanics and expand the potential audience beyond the traditional hardcore / competitive gamer player types associated with RTS games.
Why You Should Be Building A Pre-Launch Community
When we develop games, we often start by focusing on ourselves, trying to create an experience or experiences that we'd want to play and enjoy, but in reality, we're really building experiences for them:
The millions of players out there in the world. I mean, we are businesses, and we need to sell our games to continue to be businesses.
The games industry is incredibly risky - Time and time again we're seeing games launch and fail due to a wide variety of reasons such as:
No pre-launch marketing and community building so no one knows about the game
Launching at the wrong time so everyone is pre-occupied with something else
The game doesn't look/feel polished enough
The game is something no one wants to play due to visuals/mechanics/narrative not hitting a chord / resonate with anyone (Lack of market research)
The Pricing strategy is wrong
The game is riddled with technical issues on launch
The game is overhyped pre-launch leading to high level of overly critical/negative reception
Developers are un-responsive to their player base or respond to negative criticism in an ineffective way causing a loss of trust.
The list could probably go on, but the important thing to note is that most, if not all of these points can be mitigated by effectively building and communicating with your community as early as possible.
A community is a sounding board, both pre and post-release. It's a place where you as developers can seek player validation, sanity check your decisions from a design, usability and business standpoint while also giving players a chance to see the inner-workings of the games development process, where you can show them the reality that games dev is hard and expensive!
Most importantly, this can and will lead to "player buy-in" and build faith between developers and their audience and also helps minimise the likelihood of toxicity within a growing community.
Seth Godin - Famous Marketing Guru
"Your smallest viable audience holds you to account. It forces a focus and gives you nowhere to hide."
We've seen the effects of not listening to your audience over the past year within the AAA space with games such as:
Fallout 76 - Stripped out all the content that people loved about Fallout and left just a hollow shell of the worst parts.
Darksiders 3 - Rather than improving upon the innovation that DS2 made over DS1 it went back to basics, creating a linear slog with terrible combat which ultimately disappointing fans of the franchise.
Metal Gear Survive - Konami building a MGS game in name only, no one wanted this game, especially with Hideo Kojima out of the picture. A Cash grab.
There is a multitude of other examples that I'm sure all of you could list.
Studios that treat their audience as cash cows rather than listening to and making informed decisions based on what their audience wants will eventually be lost and forgotten, shunned by their community for not listening.
It's essential that we build our studios on a foundation of player trust and open communication. Making the players part of the development process, making us accountable for our decisions.
Many of us are in a unique position compared to studios working on established franchises with established communities with pre-conceived expectations and this means we can start with a relatively clean slate that allows us to control the message we want to give to our players. We hold all the cards and can influence and shape our community before it has a chance to grow to a point where it's autonomous - but this also means that its essential that the right kind of seeds are sown so that when the community does grow, it flourishes, growing into something wonderful instead of something out of our control.
So, hopefully, I've convinced you of the importance of creating a pre-launch community, but how exactly do you go about building it.
When we first started working on NeuroSlicers, we didn't do this, we started building our community through a lot of trial and error, feeling our way through the process and we made a lot of mistakes along the way - I mean, try running a Kickstarter campaign with a game called Failure.....what NeuroSlicers used to be called!
I wish I'd known this stuff 3 years ago, but I'm also glad we learnt the hard way and built upon our experience which has helped us define who we are now.
We can now, hopefully, share a better way to go about doing things.
Brand, Communication And Content Strategy
Well, the first step is to make sure you have a good brand and communication strategy in place that can be used by your whole team and which defines how you'll attract and talk with your community, acting as a set of guidelines that will give the team direction and motivation. There is a multitude of other benefits and elements that make up the process of branding (ie, the Logo) that could be a whole another talk in itself, but here I'm just going to cover the key elements you'll want in the documents specific to the communication side of things, rather than visual identity:
The Brand Strategy
You'll want to put together a document with the following:
The Game Elevator Pitch
You want the whole team to be able to memorise this; its a summary of everything that is your game and should be enough to get people excited
Our one, for NeuroSlicers, is possibly a bit too long, but I've been using it for the past 3 years of pitching so it's kinda stuck:
